By: Lisa Tieglman-Koepp, M.S.Ed., LPC, NCC
I wish for you the courage to see the world, the fashion industry and magazines, health food stores and weight loss companies, network marketers and independent distributors of nutritional products, as entities dependent upon your hatred of yourself.

I wish for you the trust to see this diet industry as predatory, with ill-intent to prey on your insecurities, hoping you’ll buy into a product or service, which fails 95% of the time. I wish these industries would simply leave you alone, but they won’t. And I won’t give up on you.

I wish for you the ability to celebrate your beauty just the way you are, your entire being, the whole of you! I wish you would have trusted that if you’d have eaten normally, intuitively and enjoyably, your weight and size would not be an issue. It’s not too late! I want you to move for the health of it and the simple enjoyment of being alive. I wish you would trust that if you do these things, you’ll be just fine.

I want to teach you to be "informed consumers", so that you do not waste another single penny on products and services that fail 95% of the time. I wish you accepted that these companies do not care about you! They care about your money, period! I wish I could help you bust through the pressure to look like models in fashion magazines and the media and teach you to trust your bodies, to live fully in them and most of all, to befriend and trust your hunger.

I wish that you’d believe that you are already programmed to be a certain size, shape and weight by your ancestry genetics and DNA, so you could take a deep breath and start accepting yourself and allow your body to do what it will. I wish you the beauty in seeing the lineage in which you come from.

I wish you the ability to salvage your metabolism. History misunderstood repeats itself, which is why the weight loss industry is so successful as you continue to fail time and time again. I hope that after years of yo-yo dieting, when your metabolism decreases and your gastrointestinal system slows down, and your body goes into starvation mode in order to protect you, you will understand that the problem all along was your attempt to lose weight, not your willpower or motivation.

I wish more people were mad enough to raise more hell about this. I wish for you the chance to celebrate the diversity of your body and love the vehicle that carries your soul, instead of trying to manipulate your weight and size. The answer to improved self-esteem is not found in this route. I wish that you take the leap of faith and love and live to the fullest potential, and start redirecting your energy towards making your unique thumb-print on the world!

About the Author: Lisa A. Tieglman-Koepp, M.S.Ed., LPC, NCC, is a therapist in private practice and the Lead IOP Therapist in the Eating Disorder Services at Aurora Psychiatric Hospital. She is the proud mom of three amazing girls.